However, since (at least for me) there’s nothing comparable to Things, I’m trying to benefit from using it the best I can. One possibility to do so is the automation of task-creation. Wouldn’t it be cool to have Things automatically pack specific e-mails together as tasks you would only need to get done – without actually having the trouble of importing the information from Mail.app manually into Things first? I solved this problem for myself by using a feature that Things, Mail.app and Mac OS X provide me by default: AppleScript.

Now, how would this automated task-creation look like. First, a piece of code is needed, which gets the specific information out of an e-mail and tells Things to add those information to its library. The CulturedCode Wiki already provides us such a script and first I’ve tried to use that. Unfortunately, the script seems to be something hacked together with Apple’s Automator and interferes with the UI, what causes the process of task-creation to be visible to the end-user. I didn’t want that – so I just hacked together my own AppleScript using the AppleScript Edior:

on perform_mail_action(info)
	tell application "Mail"
		set selectedMessages to |SelectedMessages| of info
		set theRule to |Rule| of info
		repeat with eachMessage in selectedMessages
			set theSubject to subject of eachMessage
			set theContent to content of eachMessage
			tell application "Things"
				set newToDo to make new to do with properties {name:theSubject, due date:current date, notes:theContent} at beginning of list "Inbox"
			end tell
			set the (read status) of eachMessage to true
		end repeat
	end tell
end perform_mail_action

You can simply copy & paste this code into your AppleScript Editor and save it somewhere in your filesystem as AppleScript.

Next, we need this script to be called as soon as a new mail arrives. Let’s use Mail.app’s “Rules” for doing that!

Mail.app Rule for Mail to Things

As “Run AppleScript” the script you’ve saved before needs to be specified. What rule you use for yourself actually depends on your incoming mails. In this example, I’m checking the mail’s subject to contain the string [ToDo]: for the script to act on that e-mail. Of course, you can also add another action *after* the “Run AppleScript” for Mail.app to delete the mail afterwards. The only thing my script does is to mark the mails that matched as read.

Now try it out on your own. Write yourself an e-mail containing your match-criteria and you’ll see that the script will automatically add a new task within your Things’ Inbox, containing all details from within the mail itself. Of course, this script can be enhanced for example by leaving away the match-criteria from the subject (s/matchpattern//g), by cutting off everything after “– ” (signature) or maybe even delegating the task to a co-worker or an area of responsibility by parsing the mail’s body. Feel free to extend it the way you need it.

PS: You can make the Inbox entries not being due by today by simply removing the “due date:current date” parameter from the script.

//UPDATE:

Because this whole automation topic is so much fun, I’ve just written an AppleScript that automatically adds every conversation-line you receive that starts with the pattern “task: ” to your Things Inbox.

Here’s the AppleScript:

using terms from application "iChat"
	on message received theMessage from theBuddy for textChat
		set theBuddy to full name of theBuddy

		if theMessage starts with "task: " then
			tell application "Things"
				set newToDo to make new to do with properties {name:theBuddy & ": " & my LeetReplacer((get theMessage), "task: ", "")} at beginning of list "Inbox"
			end tell
		end if
	end message received
end using terms from

on LeetReplacer(strng, srch, replc)
	tell (a reference to my text item delimiters)
		set {old, contents} to {contents, srch}
		set {strng, contents} to {strng's text items, replc}
		set {strng, contents} to {strng as Unicode text, old}
	end tell
	return strng
end LeetReplacer

And here’s how you can include it into iChat:

iChat to Things

Enjoy!

As I’ve written, moving the application-folders into the cloud seems to be working pretty good on one client. Now I’ve tested, how it is when using two clients and pulled the information contained in the cloud (from client A) down to client B. Each of the three applications worked in general, Pidgin started with the account configured on client A, Evolution started with the Inbox configure in client A but asked me for the password to access the mail-server (what’s clear, because I did not synchronize the key-rings) and Firefox displayed with the preferences configured, but prepended a message box that said:

Could not initialize the application’s security component. The most likely cause is problems with files in your application’s profile directory. Please check that this directory has no read/write restrictions and your hard disk is not full or close to full. It is recommended that you exit the application and fix the problem. If you continue to use this session, you might see incorrect application behaviour when accessing security features.

This confused me a bit, especially since the actual browser ran without any more problems. However, I’ve been to lazy to track down this permission problem.

After I’ve checked, if “one-after-another” synchronization worked, I tried out the simultaneous usage of both machines, while being connected and synced with the cloud on each of them. As I’ve expected, I ran into some problems: Suddenly, some more folder (thumbnail) appeared within the client B’s Ubuntu One folder, that contained his app-information. The folders remained until the actual Home folder finished receiving the data from within the cloud, then they just disappeared. I don’t know, if those have been merged or just deleted – it just worked afterwards.

Ubuntu One seems to be using “semaphores”, in a similar way token-ring was using: At first, client A is allowed to sync his data with the cloud. When this is finished, client B is allowed to sync. Then, it’s client A’s turn again – and so on. Theoretically, this is good. But in practice, Ubuntu One unfortunately seems to overwrite locale changes when pulling data down from the cloud. In comparison: MobileMe asks the user and merges the data, as good as possible.

In the end, simultaneous usage was unable to sync both machines in a way, so that data was kept consistent. Either one machine lost information, or the other. Especially when adding a new Pidgin account on client B, waiting for the sync, closing Pidgin on client A (which then seems to save a final account-info) and waiting for the sync there, you will be surprised your account not to be available when re-launching Pidgin on client A.

Of course, synchronization always is a tricky feature, but I guess, Ubuntu One lacks of an SVN-like back-end, that keeps track of all changes and makes merging possible. I’m really interested in how Ubuntu One will continue to evolve and I’ll try to keep tack of its development status. This could really kick ass someday, as soon as everything works seamless and simultaneous.

For my tests, I was using a vanilla Ubuntu 9.04 with latest package versions/updates installed. The installation of the PPA was pretty simple, thanks to the DEB provided on the Ubuntu One site, although I could not install the Ubuntu One GNOME-Client using the one-click feature implemented on the official Install-site. This probably could be the first thing a regular user could trap on.

So, after installing the packages manually by using a terminal and aptitude, the client appeared in Ubuntu’s “Internet”-submenu of the panel-main-menu. When a user installs Ubuntu One on a new computer and clicks the client’s icon within the menu to start the service, he will get a browser-window containing an Ubuntu One authorization-page. There, the user needs to click the “Authorize this Computer” button, so the computer will be able to sync with the Ubuntu One cloud. I took a quick look behind the scenes and as far as I’ve seen, Ubuntu One uses regular OAuth to authenticate computers to the cloud. The OAuth-token therefor will be saved within the “Passwords & Keys” thingy, that’s found somewhere in the main-menu.

However, the sync service itself creates a “Ubuntu One” folder within your home-directory, which syncs up into the cloud. Within this folder, there’s also a sym-linked-folder for Public content. The client-daemon doesn’t seem to be using some mechanism like iNotify to sync the folder contents up to the cloud, or if it does, it’s simply broken. At least on my test-machine, the client synchronized periodically – and by periodically I mean cycles with noticeable pauses in between. On one way that’s good, because not every tiny-whiny change that will be made to the folder’s contents will be pushed up to the cloud, what would literally kill your bandwidth, but on the other hand, the actual duration from one sync to another is just too big to be used with multiple devices simultaneously (e.g. an Android implementation or even another client-computer).

Talking about the simultaneousness, I don’t think that Ubuntu One is (yet) planned to be used on multiple computers simultaneous. On my test-setup I’ve created a sub-folder named “Home”, where I moved some dot-starting-folders from within my actual $HOME to and soft-linked them back to their actual location. My setup then looked something like:


devilx@vm-ubuntu:~$ ls -la | grep ^lrw*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 devilx devilx 38 2009-09-12 20:32 .evolution -> /home/devilx/Ubuntu One/Home/evolution
lrwxrwxrwx 1 devilx devilx 36 2009-09-12 20:31 .mozilla -> /home/devilx/Ubuntu One/Home/mozilla
lrwxrwxrwx 1 devilx devilx 35 2009-09-12 20:33 .purple -> /home/devilx/Ubuntu One/Home/purple
devilx@vm-ubuntu:~$


By this, I’ve pushed the preferences and information of my Firefox, my Evolution and my Pidgin into the cloud. A quick test showed me, that none of those three applications complained about their new “home” being a symlink to some directory within the cloud – and neither about any insufficient permissions that could have happened, if the cloud was set-up crappy (+1P for Ubuntu One). Still, this setup seems not that perfect for me, at the moment.

The synchronization of a modified .mozilla and especially of a modified .evolution folder seems to take for years. While I’m writing this text, the client-daemon is still synchronizing the files (it started nearly at the same time I’ve started writing this entry) and says “Updating 6 of 270 files…” – this could become a looooong night. Though, I don’t want to complain about Ubuntu One’s performance, since yet, it’s still in Beta (even if I don’t know, if Beta isn’t just an upcoming trend every company has to stick with -> e.g. Google).

I’ll try to clone this Ubuntu-installation and run them both with Ubuntu One being active – first, one after another (to see, if the applications could be synced without them complaining about parameters, that are incorrect for the secondary host they get synced to -> e.g. hostname information) and then I’ll try to run them simultaneously and hope for the best. If it should work out (what I don’t expect, just from what I’ve seen in similar projects), it would be really cool, because then, most applications could be synced this way without much hassle. I’d be really surprised, if this should be working, because then, the cloud seems to implement some kind of “merge” service, which allows you to upload data from two (or more) clients and seamlessly merge it up in the cloud together to one, consistent state.

Eh, I will see. Altogether, Ubuntu One is yet already working pretty cool, though I’m not quite sure, what a regular user should do with it, if he’s already aware of service like Dropbox or Amazon’s S3 – because at the moment, Ubuntu One unfortunately isn’t any better than those services. It just integrates more seamless into the GNOME-desktop. Hm… oh well.

The current service-site describes the services mainly as synchronization option for your Ubuntu workstations, so that everything is kept up to date. My first thought on this was, that they’re using webdav (just like Apple does for their iDisk) for accomplishing this task, but as it seems, there’s no webdav involved. Maybe it’s built-up on Amazon’s S3?

I don’t know yet, since up to now I haven’t received my invitation to join and use this service. I was told that invitations are being sent amongst others depending on the service’s usage, so I really hope (since the ubuntuone.com isn’t that popular, yet) to receive mine soon.

Depending of how good this service works already, it could be a really good competitor to Apple’s MobileMe – especially if it should get an own “Exchange for the Rest of Us”, heh. I don’t know what’s planned to be implemented and as it seems there’s not much talking about that, but I’d really welcome it to see a working solution on that area.

As soon as I’ll receive the invitation, I will take Ubuntu One on a test-drive and try to see whether it would be possible to use this service on other distributions as well. I really can’t wait to get my hands on the service’s software, heh…

Also, I would like to see a new (more affordable) Apple TV with more hard drive capacity and the information that movies are finally available in Germany, too. Also, a DVD-R or Blu-Ray drive integrated into the Apple TV would be very nice.

Whatever, I think we’ll need to wait and let us surprise, what Santa Jo..eh.. Schiller brings us this year, heh.

Talking about Cloud Services

The past few days I was thinking pretty much about the upcoming trend of “Clouds”. By that, I of course do not me the weather occurrence – I am talking about “Cloud”-Services.
 
So, what is a Cloud-Service in general? To summarize it up, a Cloud-Service is a Service provided by a third-party which allows me to use features I could probably not or just with a  huge effort use without it. Furthermore, a Cloud provides me features which are often described as “seamless”, “immediately”, “push” or “over the air”. A very popular topic in which Clouds are being used nowadays is synchronization. “I want my data, and I want it everywhere, every time”, that is actually the main mission Clouds often try to realize. Two examples for very popular Clouds are RIM’s BlackBerry service and the newcomer called MobileMe, carried by Apple.

So, I informed myself a bit about these two Clouds, because I actually wanted to know, if it’s worth spending money on such a service. I’ve seen a demonstration of MobileMe at one of Apple’s Keynotes some time ago and it got me interested. The BlackBerry service I can see everyday at work, though I’ve never really informed myself about the technique it’s using in the background, until now. The only technical information I had about this gadgets was, that they’re pretty good in keeping a companies infrastructure team occupied for days/weeks while solving curious, irreproducible problems. Because of that, BlackBerry goes back a long way with me, so that I would not be able to carry out a comparison between these two services and say what’s better and what’s not. Luckily, this is not what I’m trying to do here. I would like to talk about such Cloud services in general (with the mentioned services in mind) and show up the problematics I see with those.

The first issue I would like to begin with concerns the administration. Let’s say, we’re using our RIM Cloud and we would like to activate a new gadget, to be able to make use of it in our network. It doesn’t seem to be pretty untypical for this activation to just fail for an unknown reason, from what I’ve seen. So, what can the administration do? Well… actually, not what their name (“administration”) is meant for, instead they have to act more like “operators”: Check the manual to see if they did everything right, check the troubleshooting FAQ and try everyone of the proposed solutions and last but not least call the support and do what they say. It’s impossible for the administration to do any kind of debugging by their self. And this fact is not only true for the activation: As soon as it gets into deeper problems with the Cloud service itself, an administrator becomes an operator or even just “remote hands” for the Cloud provider.

“And why is that bad?”, you might ask now. Well, by that, a company’s infrastructure is depending on a third-party service provider’s reaction times and ways, for services that could be probably used in other kinds with more efficiency and what is more important, without a third-party. This argument seems to be pretty thin on the first look, because now you could say that in general everything that has to do with communications is managed by third-parties (e.g. cell-carriers, ISPs), but still there’s one difference: The probability of failures or breakdowns of the respective “Cloud”. The chance of my mobile-phone to not deliver SMS or connect to the UMTS network because of provider-side failures are much lower, than the chance of a BlackBerry to deny its service partially, due to problems on the provider’s side, between the communication components on the provider’s an the client’s side or between the data exchange from the client’s groupware to his communication component. And like I just said, in most cases the administration is powerless and can’t debug what goes wrong.

Another aspect of Clouds regard the data security. When there’s a third-party involved in that whole “I want to synchronize my life”-thing, you can never know who’s actually reading along. Of course, the cool graphics on the provider’s sites show you that the whole traffic between the endpoints (communication component on the client’s side and mobile gadget) is end-to-end encrypted with strong algorithms. But do you really know?

Let’s be paranoid: What if RIM for example, builds up an end-to-end encryption between the client’s communication component (e.g. BES) and the “left side” of a proxy running within their infrastructure. On the “right side”, this proxy sets up an end-to-end encryption between itself and the mobile gadget. For the customer it could look like he just “paired” his device with his communication component and everything is strongly secure, but the provider could still log everything passing through his proxy.

Or let’s take Apple. They don’t even seem to really try to implement security. Maybe regular Apple user’s are that naive and/or unaware of the risks of missing security, that they just do not care. The MobileMe “Web Apps” (the web-interface for accessing your data) does only provide SSL encryption on login and when account-information are changed – at least this is my last level of information. Please correct me, if I might be wrong on this. Besides of this, I know that IMAP and SMTP seems to be encrypted, but I’m not sure what’s with the synchronization of your iCal, your contacts or your files.

Nevertheless, Apple’s MobileMe pushes the security and data sensitivity question to a higher level: What happens with the data I’m transmitting to my Cloud? Where is it actually stored? Who has access? Et cetera. The presentations of MobileMe really look cool, and it’s interesting to see all that implemented without using Redmond’s “ActiveSync”. Though, it’s questionable in what way the data users upload will be used. And it’s even more questionable, why people might pay for letting third-parties use their data, without thinking twice of the consequences this could have.

I mean, of course it would be possible to use GPG for encrypting every mail and every file pushed to the Cloud, unfortunately this would make the data pretty unusable on the mobile gadgets, what by the way makes me think of another point: How come, there are nearly no data encryption products available for Cloud services, provided by other companies? I know, that PGP has some BlackBerry add-on which allows the clients to secure at least their e-mails through PGP encryption and even make them readable on their mobile gadgets. Unfortunately this only solves the mail part, everything else could theoretically still be read by other parties (for example the government of India ). And MobileMe doesn’t provide something like PGP at all.

To sum it up, I would say that the general problem with Clouds is the lose of control about data and functionality. Sensitive information gets spread through the net to service providers and maybe other companies, without the client even noticing it. And all this because of all kind of push services and synchronization features, which could actually be done in other ways, without a third party clouds. Why not using IMAP(S) idle on the mobile gadgets for e-mails? Why not setting up an MS Exchange and using ActiveSync with your iPhone or whatever else mobile device? It would work, just the way BlackBerry or MobileMe does, with pros and cons. But at least, it would be a solution managed by oneself, not involving a third-party and especially not sending sensitive data through not trust-worth services.

Oh well.

So simple. Mac.

However, I’m also still searching for a way to centralize my calendars and contacts, but still I couldn’t find an OpenSource solution that would fit my needs. Everything I tried out was crappy in a way and nothing more than wasted time. I slowly start being a rooter of the philosophy to just enjoy high-tech without having to do anything for it but pay the reasonable price. For example, imagine this scenario: You come home from work-out, you enter your flat and automatically your iPod/iPhone receives the latest songs and videos you downloaded onto your Apple TV. You sit down to watch some TV via your T-Home Entertain, suddenly your iPhone rings and John wants to know where that cuban restaurant was in which you’ve been lately with your girl. You tell him to check his e-mails and without moving to your desk you search for the picture you took in there and send him an e-mail with the adress you saved in your maps – right from your iPhone that just connected to your AirPort. While transmitting the mail you remember yourself wanting to call that guy from work that sent you his phone-number by mail. You open the mail and just take over the phone number to the newly-created contact on your mobile. After calling him you turn of the TV and walk to your MacPro waiting for work under your desk. You log in and remember having some more info about that guy you just called somewhere on a dashboard-note. You then just open your contacts on your MacPro, open the contact you created five minutes ago with your iPhone and add the additional info – thanks to MobileMe! Oh, it’s already 8:30 PM and you wanted to meet some friends at the internet-cafe in the city, but you’re just in the middle of a document and wanted to send it to your colleague this evening… no problem, MobileMe also centralizes stored data! You just grab your black MacBook and take off for a chilled evening at the cafe.

I’m really not a fan of Apple and their work, but the point is that in the next ten years you still won’t be able to do this with OpenSource software in any way. So actually now I’m really thinking of saving some money and investing it into all the stuff I just mentioned. Regardless of whether Apple, the NSA or even Mossad might be the carrier of MobileMe or the fact that Apple might steal OpenSource innovations and sell them overpriced. The thing is: It just works. Besides, I’m personally getting pretty pissed of trying to establish things/services I find useful in home-use based on OpenSource software. I’m still searching for an OpenSource Media Center that fits all my needs, but there is none. XBMC would be the only one which I would call “sexy!”, unfortunatelly I don’t own an XBOX and I’m not a fan of doing modifications to the hardware or using weird hacks to get that software running on it. And from what I’ve heard, XBMC doesn’t behave yet pretty stable when trying to use it on a Linux. Besides, this would again imply quite some work. And that is why I mean by getting pissed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not turning my back to OpenSource – I just understood that it’s pretty senseless to try to realize extraordinary things with an minimal amount of work using OpenSource software. I want someone else to do the work for me (e.g. Jobs) and just enjoy the benefits of modern technology and software.

I’m really excited to see the success Apple will have thanks to their cool, new, life-improving, making-sex-better, tastier-beer service, heh.